It's Not a Pretty Sight Read online

  “No.”

  Looking up Virgie Olivera had been something he was saving as a last resort, judging her to be the least of his possible leads. Sometimes, he was clairvoyant like that.

  “Anyway, Rosie told me they were dead,” Singer went on. “They were both killed at a party last Christmas. They were standing out on the lawn with a group of other people when an argument broke out and … somebody drew a gun.” She gave her shoulders a little shrug and left it at that.

  “Okay. So them I can scratch off my list,” Gunner said, actually thankful to have had even this small part of his job done for him.

  “And Trini and Shirley?”

  Gunner just shook his head.

  Singer told him she was ready to go home.

  fourteen

  SHIRLEY CAUSWELL’S RESPONSE TO GUNNER’S ASSERTION that she had been in love with Nina Pearson was surprisingly succinct: “Yeah, so?”

  He wasn’t sure what else he had been expecting her to say, but he was taken aback nonetheless.

  “Then you admit that it’s true,” he said.

  “You think of any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “No. But then, I can’t think of any reason for you to take this long to tell me about it either.”

  “You can’t? How about, it’s none of your fucking business? That’s a good reason, isn’t it?”

  They were standing out in the front yard, beneath the giant avocado tree where Gunner’s red Cobra was still parked. They talked with the car between them, because that was how Causwell wanted it. She kept her back to the house’s front door, seemingly ready to retreat at any time, given just the slightest provocation.

  She was wearing a pale blue summer dress, and sandals. Like a college girl dressed for a spring-morning walk on campus. Gunner tried to focus on her anger, and not her beauty, but it was hard; he liked what he saw, despite himself.

  “You didn’t think I’d find out anyway?” he asked her.

  “I figured somebody would tell you, sure. But so what? What do I care what you know? Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m the man who’s trying to find Nina’s murderer. I told you and Angela that two days ago.”

  “And we told you, the cops already have Nina’s murderer. Only you’re too thick-headed to understand that.”

  “Meaning Michael again.”

  “She loved him. She loved that sonofabitch!” She was trembling, tears suddenly rolling down both cheeks. “He was a filthy, dirty, mindless piece of shit who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as she did! He made her feel small! He made her feel ugly!” She pounded her chest with one fist, said, “But I loved her. I loved her! And I could have made her happy, if … if …”

  “If she had let you,” Gunner said.

  “No! Not if she had let me! If they had let me! If all her so-called ‘friends’ had just left us alone and let her make up her own mind about what she wanted to do, and who she wanted to be with. If they had just left us alone—”

  “Nina wouldn’t be dead right now.”

  “No! She wouldn’t! She’d be okay. She and I …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “What? What would you be?” Gunner asked.

  But Causwell was shaking her head at him, a tiny smile playing over her tear-streaked face. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” she said, laughing now. “Nice try, Mr. Gunner, but no.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t kill her! All right? So you can get that thought out of your tiny little mind right now. I loved her, yes, and I was hurt that she didn’t want me, yes—but I didn’t kill her. I’m sorry.”

  She had caught him trying to maneuver her toward a hasty confession, and now he didn’t know quite what to say.

  She had all the anger and rage a man could ever want to find in a potential murder suspect, but it was all misdirected. If the victim had been anyone else—Singer, Serrano, Angela Glass, or Agnes Felker, even—she’d be perfectly suited for the crime. But Nina? As much as he hated to admit it, Gunner could no longer see it.

  “Tell me about Trini and Nina,” he said, trying not to sound as unnerved as he was. “Was Trini trying to seduce her, or not? That’s the question.”

  Causwell smiled again. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m asking for your opinion, not mine. Am I going to get to hear it, or not?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. She wasn’t. Nina thought she was, but she wasn’t. It wasn’t like that with Trini.”

  Gunner would have bet money she was going to say just the opposite.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Am I sure? No. You asked for my opinion, so I gave it to you. All Trini wanted to be with Nina was friends. Nina only thought she wanted to be more because Wendy had her spooked into thinking that way.”

  “What about the bracelet Trini gave her? The one with the amorous inscription on it?”

  “Bracelet?” Causwell shook her head. “I don’t know anything about any bracelet.”

  “You never saw Nina wear one?”

  “A bracelet? No. Only jewelry I ever saw Nina wear were rings. Trini told you she gave her a bracelet?”

  “Yeah. But I’m beginning to think she was putting me on.”

  “You mean she lied to you.”

  “Somebody’s been lying to me,” Gunner said.

  There’d been an accusation hidden in the comment, of course—but Causwell acted like she hadn’t heard it.

  Speaking to Angela Glass again wasn’t on his agenda, but he asked for her anyway, figuring as long as he was here he could ask her about Nina’s bracelet. Give her the same chance he’d given Singer and Causwell to say she’d never even heard of such a thing, let alone seen one. Singer told him she was out.

  He called both Ziggy and Mickey from Sisterhood before he left, and each man told him the same thing: No one from the LAPD or the DA’s office had called this morning looking for him. Yet.

  Because it was no longer fair to Mickey to do otherwise, he finally brought his landlord up to speed on Russell Dartmouth, making him promise to call the cops at the first sign of anybody who even resembled the crazed maniac. Mickey made noises like he was stupid enough to try and take Dartmouth on by himself, he showed his face around the shop, but they both knew he was only talking.

  What Gunner planned to do now was turn his attention to Gary Stanhouse, dig up a home address for the attorney and prepare to shadow him all weekend long, if necessary. But three blocks from Sisterhood House, on his way in to Mickey’s, he was sitting in the Cobra at a crosswalk, waiting for a trio of women to cross from the south side of Adams Boulevard to the north side, when a flurry of activity to his right caught his eye. He turned to see two black people going at it, a man and a woman, the man trying to force the woman into the passenger seat of a parked car, the woman trying to pull out of his grasp. It was a heated, noisy altercation, but it didn’t turn really ugly until the man got tired of pushing and pulling and slapped his larger partner twice, hard. Gunner could actually hear the blows land from where he was sitting in the car. He also recognized the woman who had absorbed them.

  Angela Glass.

  He yanked the Cobra’s wheel, turning right off of Adams onto Cimarron, and parked across the street. Neither Glass nor her friend noticed as he sprinted toward them, the man too busy cramming Glass’s sobbing form down into his car, Glass herself too busy trying to keep him from closing the door on her. Coming up behind him, Gunner clapped one hand on the man’s right shoulder and said, “Hey.”

  The smaller man turned around and Gunner slapped him with an open right hand across his face, trying to leave an imprint of his palm on the man’s left cheek he would have to live with for the rest of his life. With a sound equal to a small thunderclap, the blow lifted the man off his feet and onto his ass, his eyes filling with tears and his face already starting to swell. He tried to scramble to his feet, but Gunner closed on him quickly to stand directly o
ver him, looking like someone who wanted very badly to put him in his grave.

  “That’s called being bitch-slapped,” the investigator said, his voice even, his expression neutral. “Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  Again, the smaller, lighter-skinned man tried to rise, his humiliation driving him, and Gunner said, “Get up so I can give you some more. Come on. You’ve got some teeth on the east side of your head need to be over on the west side, let’s go.”

  “Mr. Gunner, no!” Glass cried behind him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” her friend demanded, trying to clear the tears from his eyes with the back of one forearm. He looked to Gunner to be in his early twenties, well under six feet in height but heavy, a combination that gave him the overall build of a slimmed-down Buddha. His head was clean-shaven, but his upper lip was not; he had labored to grow a mustache there that you could almost miss if you weren’t looking for it.

  “I’m a friend of the lady’s,” Gunner told him.

  “A friend?”

  “That’s right. You have a problem with that?”

  “Mr. Gunner, please! Leave him alone!” Glass pleaded, coming up on Gunner’s right to take his arm. “You don’t understand!”

  Gunner finally took his eyes off the man sprawled out beneath him to look at her. “I understand he was kicking your ass for everybody on Adams Boulevard to see. I understand that,” he said.

  “I know, I know, but—”

  “That ain’t none of your motherfuckin’ bus’ness!” her friend said. “We wuz havin’ a private argument!”

  “You stupid ass. You were slapping the shit out of a woman on a busy street corner at high noon,” Gunner said. “How the fuck do you figure that’s a private argument?”

  “Don’t matter what it was! It didn’t have nothin’ to do with you, you didn’t have no bus’ness jumpin’ in it! Tell ‘im, Angela!”

  “He’s right, Mr. Gunner! It was a private argument!” Glass agreed.

  Gunner glared at her, incredulous. “Say what?”

  “We were just havin’ a little disagreement, that’s all. Buster wasn’t tryin’ to hurt me or anything.”

  “You hear that? You hear what she just said?” Buster said, finally clambering to his feet. He’d been inching away from Gunner steadily, and now he felt far enough out of the investigator’s reach to brave standing up. “We wuz havin’ a disagreement! I wasn’t hurtin’ the bitch!”

  Gunner looked at Glass, said, “I don’t care what he was doing. He’s going home, and you’re coming with me. Right now.”

  “No!” Glass said.

  “She don’t wanna go with you, man!” Buster screamed.

  Turning to face him, Gunner said, “I mean it, June bug. You’re not in that car and out of my sight in thirty seconds, it’s you and me. Till somebody isn’t breathing anymore. You think I’m fucking around, keep standing there.”

  “Mr. Gunner, please!” Glass protested again.

  “Angela, goddamnit—” Buster started to say.

  “Angela’s got no say in this,” Gunner told him. “I’m talking to you. You’ve got twenty seconds.”

  “But Mr. Gunner—” Glass said.

  “Shut up and go get in my car. The red one, across the street. Right now.” When Glass opened her mouth to complain, he said, “Or would you rather I went back to Sisterhood alone and told Wendy Singer about all this? That what you want?”

  Glass didn’t say anything.

  “Go on and get in the car,” Gunner told her again.

  She looked at Buster imploringly.

  “You get in that car, bitch, it’s your ass,” he said.

  It had been the wrong thing to say. She heard the word “bitch” and her face changed, indecision turning to angry resolve, right before his eyes.

  She went and got in Gunner’s car.

  Both men watched her go, then faced each other once more.

  “You’re down to five seconds, sweet pea,” Gunner said. He was rubbing his right palm with his left hand like he thought he might soon have to use it again.

  Buster just stood there, sizing him up, trying to assess his chances against this larger, wiser, seemingly all too earnest opponent, and eventually reached the conclusion any smart man would have: He was way out of his league.

  “This ain’t over, motherfucker,” he said, pointing a finger at Gunner’s face even as he walked in a wide circle to get around him. “Don’t think it is. You shoulda minded your own goddamn bus’ness!”

  Gunner watched in silence as he made his way over to the driver’s side of the primer-spotted, big-tired Toyota Corolla sitting at the curb.

  “Next time you see me, I’m gonna have somethin’ for you,” Buster said.

  “Shit. The next time you see me, you’d better have something for me,” Gunner said, smiling. No one was ever as bad as they were going to be, the next time Gunner saw them.

  Glass’s friend jumped in the car, then glared out the open side window at the woman sitting in Gunner’s red Cobra over on the opposite side of the street. “I’ll talk to you later!” he promised Glass, before starting the Toyota’s engine and roaring away, laying down a long trail of rubber on the pavement behind him.

  After a while, Gunner joined Glass in the Cobra and said, “What the hell are you doing?” Careful to sound more disappointed than angry, because he wanted her to feel stupid, not defensive.

  “I didn’t need your help,” she said.

  “You need somebody’s goddamn help. Running around with a gutless punk like that.”

  “He’s not like that, Mr. Gunner. You don’t know him.”

  “I know he thinks your name is ‘bitch.’ And that when he wants you to do something you don’t want to do, his answer to the problem is to put his foot in your ass. I know that.”

  Glass shook her head, said, “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about! You don’t know him! He ain’t like that!”

  “You won’t get in the car, so he’s going to put you in the car. Right? Even if he has to break every fucking bone in your body to do it!”

  “That’s not how it was! I … He wasn’t ready for me to go yet. That’s all. He loves me. He loves me, an’ it’s hard for him to say good-bye, we only been together a few minutes. It’s hard for him.”

  “But it’s not hard on you, huh? When he feels like putting a fist down your throat because you’ve done something to piss him off. That’s not hard on you.”

  “He’s gettin’ help! All right? He’s tryin’ to change! You think I’d be with ‘im if he wasn’t tryin’ to change?”

  Gunner shook his head, hoping to end this conversation before it could go any further, and said, “Save it, Angela. He was right, this was none of my business. He likes treating you like a speed bag, and you like being treated like one, so forget about it. It’s a marriage made in heaven—forgive me for butting in.”

  “Mr. Gunner …”

  He started the car.

  Glass grabbed him by the arm and, screaming to be heard over the Ford V-8’s throaty rumble, said, “You can’t tell Wendy about any of this! Please! She’ll throw me out if she finds out!”

  Gunner studied her face, looking for whatever real emotion lay behind it. She was faking it, he could put her out of the car and leave without a backward glance, but if she wasn’t …

  He killed the Cobra’s engine again, knowing naked desperation when he saw it.

  “How long has this been going on?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “All right, get out of the car. You want to play dumb and dumber, go find another partner.”

  “No! We … Three weeks. It’s been goin’ on for three weeks.”

  “You’ve been sneaking off to see that idiot for three weeks?”

  “Yes. But he’s not an idiot.”

  Gunner grew quiet for a moment. “That’s where you were last Tuesday night. With him.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that whole story about being at the library
—” “Was a lie. Yes. I’m sorry.”

  Gunner turned his head away in disgust. “Jesus Christ.”

  He didn’t speak again for a long time.

  He took her back to Sisterhood House and just dropped her off, never getting out of the car. She was terrified he’d tell Singer everything, but he couldn’t see the point. If she wanted to make a joke out of Singer’s hospitality and naiveté, that was her choice to make. She couldn’t see where she was doing anything wrong in any event, since Buster was ostensibly seeing a counselor about his “aggression problem” twice a week, not because he’d been ordered by the court to do so, but because he loved her and wanted to stop mistreating her. Gunner just shook his head.

  He knew that anything he had to say to her, Singer had already said, no doubt a thousand times, but he gave her a brief lecture on the way to the House anyway, if only to give himself the satisfaction of telling her how pathetic she’d just become in his eyes. She wanted to go on being Buster’s fool, he couldn’t stop her—but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to make her feel bad about it. He felt bad about it, why shouldn’t she?

  He drove to Mickey’s deep in thought, wondering how many more people he’d once suspected of committing Nina’s murder he’d have to write off before the day was done. He was essentially down to two viable candidates, Stanhouse and Serrano, both Causwell and now Glass having given him cause to all but eliminate them from the running. Neither had proven their innocence, exactly, but he could no longer generate any real suspicion about either of them. Causwell, because she’d apparently loved Nina too much to kill her, and Glass, because she’d allegedly been too busy loving someone else, somewhere else, at the time of Nina’s death.

  Serrano, meanwhile, was looking more and more like a liar—if not a murderer—every minute. Because Glass couldn’t remember ever seeing this bracelet the photographer had told him about either. That made three people he had asked about it, and three people who’d claimed ignorance of it. Singer, Causwell, and Glass, a perfect three out of three. Either Nina had been so embarrassed by the gift that she’d never shown it to a living soul, or it was a figment of Serrano’s imagination. Something she’d just invented as an excuse for going through Nina’s things at the House.